The world in AD 1750

Africa

At the Cape of Good Hope, the Dutch East India Company colony depended on enslaved labor brought across the Indian Ocean. South African History Online records that India supplied about 80 percent of the Cape’s slaves in the early 18th century, that a slaving post at Delagoa Bay was opened in 1721 and given up in 1731, and that between 1731 and 1765 more and more slaves were bought from Madagascar. The same account puts the Cape’s slave population at 2,500 in 1720 and 14,500 in 1790.

• Fort Jesus, Mombasa: a 1593 cornerstone and a siege of 33 months1696
• 'Den rechten eygenaer off den vremden innemer': the Cape, 1652–16601652
• A 900-meter wall and a fixed capital: Fasilides at Gondar, 16361636
• Three dates, one handshake: Stanley meets Livingstone, 18711871

West Asia

Isfahan, the old Safavid capital, changed hands in 1750 in the name of a dynasty that no longer ruled. Encyclopaedia Iranica records that Karim Khan, chief of the Zand, and the Bakhtiari chiefs Ali-Mardan Khan and Abu’l-Fath Khan occupied the city that year for a Safavid princeling, Abu Turab, whom they styled Shah Ismail III. Ali-Mardan then killed his partner and raided Shiraz, and Karim Khan came back to Isfahan in January 1751, defeated him, and took the title of wakil, or regent. Iranica dates his rule over Persia outside Khorasan from 1751 to 1779.

• Four sealed translations in 1857: Rawlinson, Behistun and cuneiform1847
• A fire in Istanbul, September 2, 1633, and the coffeehouses closed1633
• How did a canal dug by Egyptians end up owned by Britain and France?1869
• How a clay tablet shook Victorian Britain, December 3, 18721872

Europe

Johann Sebastian Bach spent the last months of his life nearly blind. The chronology kept by the Bach-Archiv Leipzig records that his health failed in 1749, with a serious eye condition and trouble in his right arm and writing hand, and that the ophthalmologist John Taylor, in Leipzig from April 4 to 7, 1750, operated on him; complications required a second operation. Bach regained some sight for a short time, then had a stroke and died on July 28, 1750. He had finished the Mass in B minor two years earlier.

• Lisbon, November 1, 1755: a death toll counted from 6,000 to 100,0001755
• Why did factories appear first in one corner of England?1771
• London Gazette no. 85: Pudding Lane, an east wind and a pillar1666
• Why did the revolutions of 1848 spread in weeks and fail in a year?1848

East Asia

King Yeongjo of Joseon made the year’s largest fiscal change in Korea. According to the National Institute of Korean History, a survey of commoner men and the cloth they owed for military service was completed in 1748, and it showed that cutting the levy from two bolts of cloth per man to one would leave the treasury about 500,000 bolts short. Senior ministers objected, but with the backing of the minister of war Hong Gye-hui the king ordered that from 1750 each man pay one bolt, and he set up an office to find other revenue. The reform was proclaimed as the Equal Service Law (gyunyeokbeop) in September 1751.

• White ash over Edo, December 16, 1707: Mount Fuji's last eruption1707
• Nerchinsk, 1689: a Qing-Russian treaty negotiated in Latin1689
• Why did Britain fight over opium, and what did the 1842 treaty start?1840
• Thirty-six of sixty-four: Hamel's Journael and the Sillok, 16531653

South Asia

A French column marched out of Gingee on December 4, 1750, and by the next morning the Deccan had a new viceroy. The British historian Robert Orme recorded that Nasir Jang, subahdar of the Deccan, was killed in his own camp by one of the Pathan nabobs allied with him, and that his nephew Muzaffar Jang, a prisoner in fetters for seven months, was hailed as ruler of a province that Orme estimated at more than 35 million people. Orme wrote that apart from the conquests of Cortés and Pizarro, “never did so small a force decide the fate of so large a sovereignty.” At Pondicherry that evening Joseph-François Dupleix held a court to receive congratulations, and a Te Deum was sung the next day.

• Plassey, June 23, 1757, and the inquiry that followed Clive home1757
• Tipu's Tiger: the growling organ taken at Seringapatam in 17991799
• Three records of one escape: Shivaji at Agra, August 16661666
• Fourteen carriages, 400 guests, 21 guns: Bombay to Thane, April 16, 18531853

Central Asia

Nader Shah’s assassination on June 9, 1747, left the oasis khanates in the hands of their own chiefs. Encyclopaedia Iranica records that in Bukhara the Manghit leader Muhammad Rahim Ataliq had put the khan Abu’l-Fayz to death and then ordered the killing of his young son and successor, Abd al-Mu’min, at a date Iranica places between 1750 and 1751. In Khiva the Manghits lost power in 1752, and in the Ferghana valley the Ming rulers held Kokand, founded in 1740. South of the Amu Darya, Ahmad Shah Durrani, crowned near Qandahar in October 1747, had made Nader’s grandson Shahrukh his vassal in Khorasan in 1749 and annexed Bactria and Badakhshan in 1751.

• Four scripts on one stone: the Torghuts' march to the Ili, 17711771
• Peter's decree of February 14, 1716, and a column split in five1717
• A lame dervish from Tehran to Samarkand: Vámbéry's ten months, 1863–641863
• A beast, a deer and a sun on a madrasa: the Sher-Dor, Samarkand1636

The Americas

Seven Jesuit missions and some 30,000 Guarani stood on land that the Treaty of Madrid of 1750 gave to Portugal. The Harvard historian Tamar Herzog writes that the Spanish king promised to evacuate them, that the Guarani could take their movable goods, and that the houses, churches and lands would pass intact to Portugal. Guarani leaders wrote letters of protest and from 1753 tried to coordinate a response; most refused to leave, and the war that Spain and Portugal fought against them from 1754 to 1756 left most of the missions destroyed or abandoned. The treaty was annulled in 1761.

• How did Haiti win freedom in 1804, then pay France for it until 1888?1804
• "In view of the opening of the Ocian": Lewis and Clark, 1804 to 18061804
• Cleared in 2022: Salem's last conviction, and the court of 16921692
• Diary lines from Keene, 1816, and a Tambora paper withdrawn in 20161816

Oceania

Trepang, the sea cucumber prized as a delicacy in China, brought boats from Makassar in Sulawesi to the north coast of Australia. In a 2010 review in PLoS One, Kathleen Schwerdtner Máñez and Sebastian Ferse cite historians who date these voyages from at least 1750 until South Australia banned them in 1906 and 1907; the fishing grounds were Marege, now Arnhem Land, and Kayu Jawa, on the Kimberley coast. Makassar’s registered exports of trepang rose from 71 tons in 1733–34 to 301 tons in 1766–67. The first European report of the fleets in Australia came from the British hydrographer Alexander Dalrymple in 1768.

• Tupaia, the Tahitian navigator who sailed with Cook in 17691769
• Botany Bay, April 1770: what Cook and Banks wrote about the Gweagal spears1770
• "Come, captain Bligh": the Bounty mutiny of April 28, 1789, on record1789
• Why do the Māori and English texts of the Treaty of Waitangi differ?1840

Sources

• South African History Online, History of slavery and early colonisation in South Africa
• Encyclopaedia Iranica, John R. Perry, Karim Khan Zand
• Bach-Archiv Leipzig, Johann Sebastian Bach: A chronology
• National Institute of Korean History, Uri Yeoksa Net, Gyunyeokbeop (1750)
• Robert Orme, A History of the Military Transactions of the British Nation in Indostan, vol. 1 (4th ed., 1803; Madras reprint, 1861)
• Encyclopaedia Iranica, Daniel Balland, Afghanistan x. Political History
• Encyclopaedia Iranica, Yuri Bregel, Central Asia vii. In the 18th–19th Centuries
• Tamar Herzog, Guaranis and Jesuits, ReVista: Harvard Review of Latin America (2015)
• Kathleen Schwerdtner Máñez and Sebastian C. A. Ferse, The history of Makassan trepang fishing and trade, PLoS One 5 (2010)